Brain Mechanisms

The author was born and educated in England, graduating from Downing College, Cambridge. He then moved to Canada where he had a 30 year career with BNR/Nortel Networks. In the course of this career he worked on many different aspectsof the design of real time electronic control systems with billions of components. He became interested in applying the techniques for designing complex systems to understanding the brain, and his first book on this topic was published in 1990. Later, he took early retirement from Nortel to work full time on understanding the brain. He lives in Vancouver, Canada but for many years has carried out research and teaching in association with the Australian National University.

Brain Mechanisms: Linking Cognitive Phenomena to Neuron Activity shows how to understand higher cognition in terms of brain anatomy, physiology and chemistry. Natural selection pressures have resulted in all information processes in the brain being one of just two general types: condition definition/detections and behavioural recommendation definition/integrations. Using these information process types, hierarchies of description can be created that map from cognitive phenomena to the activity of the billions of neurons in the brain. These hierarchies make it possible to create an intuitively satisfying understanding of how neuron activity results in human memory, consciousness and self-awareness. These ideas were previously described at a technical level in Towards a Theoretical Neuroscience: from Cell Chemistry to Cognition. This book presents the ideas for a more general readership.